


so deep in static

by race_the_ace



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 15:41:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/928237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/race_the_ace/pseuds/race_the_ace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s everything Derek isn’t. She’s put-together and charming and self-assured and <i>employed</i>. Jennifer is an honest-to-god adult and Derek still feels like a lost boy, most days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so deep in static

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s Notes:  
> \- Some time between like their convo in the classroom and Derek showing up bloody at her car? I hope that’s not the same ep, haha. I’m too lazy to check. If it is, just stretch time, the way they do on the show! \o/  
> \- Title from Here’s Everything I Always Meant To Say by Jamisonparker.  
> 

*****

She has _chutzpah_. 

That’s what Derek likes about her. That and her smile and her eyes and the way that after the wariness came the kindness and the gentleness. It helps that she’s his age, for once. 

She’s everything Derek isn’t. She’s put-together and charming and self-assured and _employed_. Jennifer is an honest-to-god adult and Derek still feels like a lost boy, most days. 

When she smiles at him, Derek doesn’t know what she sees, but he wants to be good enough to have earned that smile. 

He doesn’t know what it is about her that cracks him open enough to want to trust her, to believe her, to give her a chance. But there’s something and Derek is both scared and hopeful at the same time. He’s spent years thinking Kate ruined him, that he ruined everything else, but Jennifer isn’t ruined. She isn’t anything but a risk. 

There’s a tiny crinkle at the corner of her eyes when she smiles and that’s enough to make Derek take the leap. 

He asks her out, in fumbled, painful words that make his heart pound and his palms sweat. She doesn’t make him wait for an answer, just tilts her head while the wind ruffles her hair and says, “Yes,” so definitively that Derek can’t breathe for a second. 

Everything is going on around him--the Alpha pack, the murders, Erica, Cora--but there is a tiny voice inside of him that sounds suspiciously like Laura telling him it’s okay to want something for himself. Just one tiny thing. 

Derek shows up at her apartment at 8:05 because Laura said never to be on time to a date, but also not to be too late. Jennifer opens the door so quickly that Derek has to think she’s been standing there waiting for him. 

It’s the first time he sees her nervous. Her fingers smooth over the curves of her dress and she chews, just a little, on her bottom lip. “Hi,” she says in a small, wondrous voice. 

“Beautiful,” Derek manages to say. Her eyes widen and Derek swallows enough to choke out, “You’re beautiful.”

She blushes and it fills her cheek and Derek hears her heartbeat tick up just for a second or two. “You look quite good yourself,” she tells him. 

Jennifer steps out of the doorway and locks the door behind her and she’s so close and Derek is so close to falling for everything she hasn’t promised him. 

She talks on the drive to the next town over. There’s a small Ethiopian restaurant there that Derek loves and he thinks (hopes) that she will love, too. She tells him about her students and her classes and her life before Beacon Hills. Derek tries to fill in subtle silences with what little information he can offer up about himself, but honestly most of his life stories end up bringing moods down, so he sticks to small, casual things. 

He’s never been told he’s funny, but she’s laughing as he holds open the door to the restaurant for her. When they’re seated her face is flush with happiness and her eyes sparkle, or maybe that’s just the lighting. 

It’s been forever since Derek has felt this way about anyone. Since he’s _wanted_ to feel this way about anyone. 

Jennifer navigates the menu with ease and foreign words roll smoothly off her tongue as though she’s well accustomed to trying out unknown syllables and pronunciations. Derek finds it utterly fascinating. 

She tells him a story of her childhood, of finding a dog, once, abandoned and injured on the side of the road. Jennifer says she did everything she could for it before it died and that, at the age of six, she had her first experience with death. 

“My mom bought me ice cream and a new book to read,” she tells him. “But I cried for a lot longer than I knew the dog.” 

In the silence that follows, Derek offers, “I had no pets growing up. My friend at school had a snake and I tried to talk my mom into one, but she never went for it.”

Jennifer makes a face. “Snake,” she says, wrinkling her nose up. 

Derek laughs, suddenly and unexpectedly, and he’s surprised for a moment that he even still can. “It wasn’t big or anything, maybe the length of an arm, and it was really thin. I used to go over and watch it eat feeder mice.”

“Boys,” Jennifer says in the same dismissive, comical way. 

And god help him, Derek is charmed by it. He wants to know every story from her childhood. He wants to hear her talk about all the books she’s always reading. Something in his chest feels warm and tight and Derek wonders when the right time to hold her hand is. 

If Laura were here, Derek could ask her. But she isn’t. All he has now is Peter and Cora, neither of whom are very chatty to him on a good day. Derek can’t imagine asking them anything more than what they want to eat for dinner. 

Derek is a coward in a hundred different ways, but not in this way, so he asks, “May I hold your hand?”

She smiles at him again--smiling, always smiling--and she reaches across the table and he meets her halfway. “With correct grammar and everything,” she grins. 

Her hand is soft and warm in his and Derek is acutely aware of their differences. Maybe this won’t ever go anywhere. Derek doesn’t know if he can work up the courage to ever tell her about werewolves, but his whole life is a maybe right now. 

Maybe he’ll die tonight at the Alpha pack’s hands. Maybe he’ll be the next sacrifice. 

Right now, though, she’s looking at him like he’s the best thing she’s ever seen, and he’s holding her hand. 

Most of Derek died in that fire and what didn’t has withered and bent. He’s tired and angry and sad and confused and he never wants this moment to end. 

The food s delicious and Derek eats slowly trying to draw the date out. What waits for him back home isn’t any kind of incentive to hurry up. For these couple of hours Derek isn’t The Alpha. He isn’t a person slowly wasting away. He’s everything Jennifer thinks he is, whatever that may be. 

He drives five miles under the speed limit on the way back and holds her hand on top of the gearshift. She can see the speedometer from her seat, he knows, but she never says anything. 

Derek walks her to her door and has no idea what to do next. She stands there, not reaching for her keys, but looking at him. Just when he thinks she’s going to lean in for a kiss, she does something better. 

She hugs him. 

Her arms are careful and light around him and it takes a second for Derek to respond, but he does. He wraps her up close and he can smell her conditioner and her deodorant and everything else that makes her _her_. 

They stand there like that, under the light of a sliver of a moon and a streetlamp far away. A car passes on the street, but all Derek hears is the steady _thump_ of Jennifer’s heart. 

When she pulls back, she looks apologetic. “Sorry,” she says. “That was awkward, right? No one hugs on a first date.” She laughs nervously. “You looked…” she trails off and Derek doesn’t ask her to finish her thought. 

“No,” he says. “That was good. I… Thank you.”

“Are you free tomorrow night?” she asks. “I know you’re supposed to wait three days or something, but patience isn’t my strong suit and I…” Jennifer bites her lip again. “I want to see you.”

Derek has no idea if he’s free. He knows he has no plans, but it’s never he who has any. It’s everyone else’s plans that consume his life these days. “I should be.”

“We can plan for eight,” she tells him. “You can pick me up again, and if something comes up, you can text.”

He touches her forearm, just for one last moment of risk. “Sounds good.”

Jennifer leans in and kisses him on the cheek and then quickly lets herself into her apartment. She gives him one last smile before the door shuts. 

Derek shoves his hands in his jacket pocket and resolutely walks away. He doesn’t know if this is good, but it doesn’t feel _bad_. Not like everything else in his life. 

But then, Kate had never felt bad either. 

-0-


End file.
